Faster than light?

[thestoat]

Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists - because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.

Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.

The result - which threatens to upend a century of physics - will be put online for scrutiny by other scientists.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484

[Sean]

I 've always had a problem with the 'lightspeed is the speed limit for the universe' thing. I have never heard a sound argument in support of this. It's something that seems to be accepted without question by the scientific community on the grounds that it makes life easier for them.

[thestoat]

I have a (very clever) friend who works there. He told me that most think the Opera scientists have overlooked something (including the Opera scientists themselves) and most people believe Einstein will be proved right, but the experiment has been opened to the wider community in order to find the truth. There is a lot of excitement there - what if Einstein was wrong, or maybe not completely correct? I find it analogous to the church - suppose they found some proof that god didn't exist. They'd all be really excited about this and ready to share the information with the wider world ... wouldn't they? (D'oh - should move the thread to the Philosophy and Religion forum )

[Timster]

I told you quantum physics was intriguing.

WE (royal) are God. And the proof is in the particles.

[Crackpot]

My particles say your particles are full of shit.

[Timster]

Apparently your particles have overlooked something...

[Crackpot]

THey overlook all! and therefore cannot be wrong

[Joe Guy]

Is there no issue in which we can ever have a truly bipartical consensus?

[loCAtek]

In spite of your philosophy, Stoat, you seem to be a very philosophical man.

[dales]

Is there no issue in which we can ever have a truly bipartical consensus?

It's turtles all the way down, Joe.

[The Hen]

It's turtles all the way down, Joe.

I concur.

[quaddriver]

WE (royal) are God.

mormon

[Timster]

WE (royal) are God.

mormon

Uhmmm...no. Not even close.

[loCAtek]

Study rejects "faster than light" particle finding

The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) tunnel, located at the CERN particle research centre near Geneva, is seen in this undated handout photograph. REUTERS/CERN-INFS/Handout

By Robert Evans

GENEVA | Sun Nov 20, 2011 6:35pm EST

(Reuters) - An international team of scientists in Italy studying the same neutrino particles colleagues say appear to have travelled faster than light rejected the startling finding this weekend, saying their tests had shown it must be wrong.

The September announcement of the finding, backed up last week after new studies, caused a furor in the scientific world as it seemed to suggest Albert Einstein's ideas on relativity, and much of modern physics, were based on a mistaken premise.

The first team, members of the OPERA experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory south of Rome, said they recorded neutrinos beamed to them from the CERN research center in Switzerland as arriving 60 nanoseconds before light would have done.

But ICARUS, another experiment at Gran Sasso -- which is deep under mountains and run by Italy's National Institute of National Physics -- now argues that their measurements of the neutrinos energy on arrival contradict that reading.

In a paper posted Saturday on the same website as the OPERA results, arxiv.org/abs/1110.3763v2, the ICARUS team says their findings "refute a superluminal (faster than light) interpretation of the OPERA result."

They argue, on the basis of recently published studies by two top U.S. physicists, that the neutrinos pumped down from CERN, near Geneva, should have lost most of their energy if they had travelled at even a tiny fraction faster than light.

But in fact, the ICARUS scientists say, the neutrino beam as tested in their equipment registered an energy spectrum fully corresponding with what it should be for particles traveling at the speed of light and no more.

Physicist Tomasso Dorigo, who works at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and the U.S. Fermilab near Chicago, said in a post on the website Scientific Blogging that the ICARUS paper was "very simple and definitive."

It says, he wrote, "that the difference between the speed of neutrinos and the speed of light cannot be as large as that seen by OPERA, and is certainly smaller than that by three orders of magnitude, and compatible with zero."

Under Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, nothing can travel faster than light. That idea lies at the heart of all current science of the cosmos and of how the vast variety of particles that make it up behave.

There was widespread skepticism when the OPERA findings were first revealed, and even the leaders of the experiment insisted that they were not announcing a discovery but simply recording measurements they had made and carefully checked.

However, last Friday they said a new experiment with shorter neutrino beams from CERN and much larger gaps between them had produced the same result. Independent scientists said however this was not conclusive.

Other experiments are being prepared -- at Fermilab and at the KEK laboratory in Japan -- to try to replicate OPERA's findings. Only confirmation from one of these would open the way for a full scientific discovery to be declared.

(Reported by Robert Evans; Editing by Andrew Heavens)